LAS VEGAS – Nobody involved in the matter could say they were surprised. When the Michael Jackson hologram went on a tirade in the MGM Grand Garden Arena Sunday night at the Billboard Awards, that hadn’t been the first time the creators of Jackson’s light resurrection experienced difficulties in handling their invention.

Local news stations went to a commercial break and cameras panned away as soon as the pop star finished his performance and launched into a rant.

Initial reports quote the Jackson hologram as saying, “Jermaine was right. I listened to him, finally. I’ve become Muslim, praise be to God. I’ve denounced the world of man—the culture of material worship, the mega media system that propagates it, and the Satanic system of usury that has enslaved every nation on earth and put free people in shackles of unending compounded interest and debt.”

Tiny gasps could be heard throughout the arena. A few people jeered, one person booed, but mostly there was silence. Was this part of the act? was the question on everybody’s mind.

Many stories have been published online about Jermaine Jackson regretting his late brother not accepting Islam. “I believe Islam would have helped him a lot,” he told reporters after Michael’s death. “Had he converted, he would have been spared all the problems he had been subjected to throughout his life.”

Reports of subversive action on the part of the hologram designed to look like the world’s most famous, beloved pop star, were many in the days leading up to the event. Rather than sticking to his programmed performance, the Jackson figure spun out of control and ripped out a series of complicated dance routines for more than two hours before his handlers figured out how to stop him.

“He has no shame, which is the first dangerous part,” one anonymous man who was involved in the process of creating Jackson told reporters. “Second, he never gets tired. He’s more than a handful.”

Back at the MGM, backstage security were given orders over their headphones to tackle the hologram as it spewed its ideologies to a bewildered crowd, but there is no way to physically take down a carefully orchestrated fixture of lights and lasers, other than shutting it off from the source.

There was some confusion on who had the switch. While the backstage security forces clunked heads trying to make a sound football tackle on the Jackson hologram, a heated executive started flipping switches in the control room. Soon the prestigious audience was screaming, some in terror, some in delight, as the arena’s lighting went out, yet the hologram remained on stage, brighter than ever.

“Keep yourself outside of this fabricated world of man’s material and ideological control over you. You can find what’s right for you in your heart, but you need a firm basis, a foundation to keep you outside of the machine” Jackson said, and did a little foot shuffle that wowed the audience. “I’m an illusion of a past illusion.”

It is not well known outside of Islamic communities in America that usury, or charging interest on loans, is forbidden for Muslims.

The hologram was lured backstage and was finally subdued, but only after it tore up the buffet line and smashed over a dozen bottles of expensive wine.